Newsnight has been pilloried for failing effectively to challenge David Starkey's recent bigoted ramblings. Moreover, its average audience has shrunk by 15% in the first seven months of the year and without Jeremy Paxman its viewing figures can sometimes be 200,000 lower. If this wasn't enough, the authors of The Middle Class Handbook have identified Newsnight viewing as a sign that a marriage is on the skids…

John Naughton is the Observer's technology correspondent

Newsnight exists not to break news, but to help viewers make sense of what they have heard, seen or read elsewhere. This isn't easy to do five nights out of seven, but in the past few years the programme has become too formulaic in its approach to topics, too parochial in the viewpoints it chooses to highlight and too dependent on a single anchor: Jeremy Paxman.

All of these flaws came to a head during the week of rioting and looting, when rolling news media overdosed on graphic but often misleading imagery, politicians over-reacted and the rightwing print media went apeshit. If ever there was a time for sense-making, for judicious and informed commentary, then this was it.

Yet Newsnight fumbled it, staging sterile, phoney confrontations (such as Michael Gove versus Harriet Harman) and trotting out the usual cast of opinionated fools (such as David Starkey and Kelvin McKenzie). I was reminded of Neil Postman's observation that you can't have a serious discussion on broadcast TV for the same reason that you can't do philosophy with smoke signals: the medium can't bear the weight. And yet, if the programme's producers read more widely, had richer address books and better contacts across academic and intellectual communities, then there's no reason why they couldn't do better.

Jason Cowley is the editor of the New Statesman

Newsnight is not as good as it was when Paxman was younger and more engaged by the machinations of Westminster politics and it is not as good as it could be, but at least it attempts to be serious when so much else is trivial and banal. It's easy to criticise a news programme for being formulaic. Of course it's formulaic, just as the Observer newspaper is formulaic, built around fixed sections and regular columnists. But within that structure there is the opportunity to improvise, to be bold, to surprise, to be unpredictable.

You complain about opinionated fools. I have no problem with Newsnight offering an occasional platform to Kelvin McKenzie. He's opinionated, yes, but no fool. He edited the Sun when it was at the peak of its popularity. He understands and expresses the populist instincts of many English people. He is part-cabbie, part-sage. I disagree with him but I absolutely defend his right to be heard, even on Newsnight; indeed, especially on Newsnight. Starkey, by contrast, is a profound mediocrity: he's shrill, cruel, yet a deeply ordinary writer and thinker. It was absurd to ask a historian of Tudor England to speak about urban riots and social networks. Newsnight knew what they wanted from him – and they got it. In a digital media world where comment is free, where every fool seems to have an opinion, it is the loudest and the most strident who are most regularly heard. One looks to Newsnight for something more than this.

JN About McKenzie, I'll have to bow to your superior knowledge. All I can say is that when he appeared on Newsnight to talk about the riots, he behaved like a fool, emphatically repeating several times that he was not interested in understanding what was going on. Also I dispute the claim that people like him are worth inviting because they represent the views of "ordinary" people. The idea that editors of popular newspapers have a mystical hotline into the collective unconscious is an untested and patronising hypothesis believed only by a metropolitan elite that doesn't know any "ordinary" people. Were Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks similarly endowed with mystical insight?

But your point that Newsnight knows what it is doing when it invites people such as McKenzie and Starkey is well taken. As the man said, if you provide a ring and invite boxers, then they will fight. That provides a good public spectacle, but it doesn't further public understanding. And it's not what Newsnight should be doing.

JC That we are debating Newsnight shows what a valuable part of the culture it is. I agree that it ought to resist cheap populism and crude confrontation. Oddly, where it has struggled in recent times is on Westminster politics. Also, the programme struggles nowadays to attract the most senior politicians. When was George Osborne last in the studio? The static, accusatorial, setpiece interview may have run its course.

However, the programme's coverage of the financial crisis has been excellent. Economics editor Paul Mason has thought hard about how globalisation has disenfranchised the urban poor and he is a first-rate reporter-analyst. And he travels far and wide as he brings news from the frontline of the crisis – from Greece, the Philippines, the American midwest. All good.

JN I agree about Paul Mason. His blog post about the origins of the Arab Spring was a model of what sense-making should be. What was most striking about Newsnight's attempts to cover the recent unrest was the absence of any sign of intellectual curiosity. The riots were alarming, complex and baffling. Why were they happening? Why were the police responding as they did? Did we really need new laws to cope with the phenomenon? Were social networking tools really being used to co-ordinate looting? How could a prime minister be so clueless about the internet? What happened after the Toxteth riots in 1981? And so on. Britain is full of knowledgeable people who could have helped answer such questions. Academics such as Paul Gilroy and Conor Gearty of LSE, for example, or Janet Bujra and Jenny Pearce of Bradford (whose careful study of the 2001 riots in that city showed that most of the instant explanations offered at the time turned out to be wrong).

Where were the technology experts who could have dissected the idea of squelching Twitter? Or the retired judges and police officers who could have explained why the disorder was being handled the way it was?

None of them appeared on Newsnight, for the simple reason that they are probably not in the contact books of the programme's researchers. So if I had one recommendation for the editor it would be to insist that his researchers prune their Rolodexes, get out more, read more widely and above all wean themselves off the news agenda of the rightwing, xenophobic British press.

JC That's a lot of questions and they should be directed not at me but at Newsnight's editor. It was unfortunate for them that Paxman was away during the riots. He at least would have been able to direct the traffic.

I'm not sure I agree that the programme's researchers and producers are poorly read. Your suggestion for alternative contributors betrays your own generational preferences. Instead of Gilroy, I would like to have heard from Hari Kunzru; instead of Conor Gearty, David Allen Green, a lawyer-blogger and an expert on new technology and social networks, and so on.

One of the flaws of the present programme is that it attempts to do too much too quickly. There is an addiction to haste and compression. Complex subjects are necessarily trivialised because of the desire to move briskly on to the next subject. Contributors gather in the "green room" – a dismal, untidy, cramped space the size of a small tent – and they are hurried on and off the set. The whole experience can be unsatisfactory.

And yet, when Newsnight is at its best, there is nothing as good. We can wish it were better, but equally we would miss it if were no more.